Canada, 2013: the privacy finding
Three PositiveSingles members complained to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada after finding their profiles, medical condition included, on dating sites they had never joined. One of the three counted her profile on 57 separate sites, among them AIDSCase.com and SyphilisDating.com, drawn from a pool the commissioner’s report describes as nearly 60 other dating sites running on one shared database.
PIPEDA Report of Findings #2013-003, dated July 11, 2013, concluded that the complainants had not provided their consent for their personal information to be used in this way
It separately found that some registered members’ personal information could be accessed by non-members via simple searches on a common search engine
which the report treats as a separate safeguards failure alongside the consent problem. The complaint was ruled well-founded and resolved. Resolved meant a real change, not just a rewording: the report records that the organization now explicitly informs users of the tiered relationship between the parent company and the affiliated websites under its control, that it changed how it notifies users before they post a profile, so that information is given at key decision points such as registration, and that it confirmed that there are no disclosures of personal information to exterior third parties.
California: the class actions
A Canadian resident and a Washington resident sued SuccessfulMatch in federal court, Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 v. SuccessfulMatch.com, No. 5:13-cv-03376-LHK, filed July 19, 2013 in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, San Jose Division. The order quotes the registration-era Terms and Conditions directly: To expand the availability of profiles on SuccessfulMatch sites, profiles may be shared with other sites within the SuccessfulMatch network. By posting or maintaining a profile on this or any other SuccessfulMatch Network site, you agree and consent that said profile shall be subject to placement on other SuccessfulMatch Network sites, at the discretion of SuccessfulMatch, without further notice.
The same registration page separately promised that We do not disclose, sell, or rent any personally identifiable information to any third party organizations
Affiliate sites named in the order include Blackpoz.com and HivAidsDating.com.
On April 16, 2014, Judge Lucy H. Koh dismissed without prejudice: the named plaintiffs had not pleaded that they actually read the statements or how they lost money, which the court called a pleading deficiency rather than implausibility; the motion to strike the nationwide class was denied. That is a dismissal on the pleadings, not a finding that the claims were false. It also left a separate case untouched: the order’s first footnote records that in the parallel Santa Clara County case the demurrer was overruled, summary judgment was denied, and the class was certified. After that, the publicly posted federal record on govinfo.gov ends with procedural orders from July and September 2014, including one setting an August 26, 2014 mediation.
What got reported about the verdict
This site could not read the Santa Clara County court’s own file, so what follows is reporting, printed as reporting, not this site’s finding. The National Trial Lawyers reported a $16.5 million award: $1.5 million compensatory and $15 million punitive, plus an injunction. The same coverage reports that the court found the Terms of Service unconscionable and the conduct in violation of California’s UCL and CLRA.
A settlement followed. Per Top Class Actions, SuccessfulMatch funded $4.2 million to resolve the California class case (No. 1-11-CV-211205) and the non-California class case the Jane Does’ claims continued as (No. 1-15-CV-276983), with a final approval hearing set for October 9, 2015 in Santa Clara County Superior Court. The non-California class, covering registrations from October 13, 2007 through February 20, 2015: non-California members with valid claims received their membership fees back in full; the California class ran October 13, 2007 through March 15, 2013. SuccessfulMatch denied wrongdoing in settling, as defendants who settle usually do; that isn’t a comment on the verdict reported above.
What the terms say now
Read without logging in on September 18, 2026, the current service agreement and privacy policy, both last updated May 12, 2026 under SuccessfulMatch.com, Inc., a Delaware corporation, state plainly that your profile may appear on other platforms hosted by the Company, Affiliates, and/or Related Parties
Affiliates are defined as other dating sites that We may own or We may have control over
. The agreement now also carries a class action waiver.
A separate clause addresses a different direction of disclosure: what other members do with what they learn about you, not what the company shares. Read September 21, 2026, Privacy SafeGuarder™ states: Unlike any other dating company, our End User Service Agreement forbids disclosing other members’ personal information FOR THE LIFETIME of the disclosing party.
It rules out disclosure for any commercial, retaliatory, revenge-driven, or publicity-related purpose
and also applies to offline interactions, including in-person coffee meetings. That promise runs between members, enforced through the same agreement that now carries the class action waiver above; whether it would hold up in a specific dispute is a legal question this page does not answer.
What joining now means
Put the two eras side by side and the honest read is this: the practice a regulator and two courts examined, a profile surfacing across an affiliated network, is spelled out today as a defined term in a document you can read before you register. That is not the same as the practice being gone: the current terms still permit that sharing, inside the same corporate structure the 2013 finding and the 2014 order describe.
If that trade-off matters to you, read the service agreement and privacy policy linked above before you pay for anything, not after. For a longer account of the same history, see hsvdatingguide’s page on the PositiveSingles lawsuit.
